Celebrating Horror’s Present: Film Review - Weapons (2025)
Director: Zach Cregger
Genre: Horror
Format: Streaming via Apple+
Seventeen children go missing from the same classroom in a small town in Pennsylvania, all at 2:17 in the morning. No one can find a reason for it. Ring cameras show the children fleeing gleefully into the night, arms outstretched, no one forcing or coercing them. Only one child in the classroom remains. As time passes, he and his teacher, Justine, become targets of the town – the only two who could hold the key to what really happened.
Told from multiple POVs and in a non-linear fashion, Weapons is a smart horror mystery in the vein of Hereditary and The Sixth Sense. It opens with creepy montage of all the missing children running into the darkness, a seventies style song playing in the background while a child narrates what’s happening. It’s weird, and somehow it fits – with the scene and with the tone of the movie, which hovers between downright scary and unabashedly strange.
The cinematography zooms along, then trails and slows, focusing in on seemingly random objects. It reminds me of Signs, the way normal moments are made unnatural – for example, when Justine’s character turns off the television in a darkened room, we see her and the setting reflected. It’s a normal image, but something about it feels menacing. Off. In another, she looks through the window of a house and is startled to suddenly spot two people sitting motionless on the couch, staring straight ahead. There are multiple moments like this where we are alerted to something we can’t understand yet. It forces us to pay attention.
It’s so interesting that Cregger chose to start the movie a month after the inciting incident. The audience wants to see more of what happened to the children (badly) but we're just as much in the dark as everyone else. There are also moments of unexpected humor, which elevate the film and add to its overall feeling of strangeness. Only one scene bothered me, and it involved grotesque violence between a gay couple. Weapons is not a gory movie. It’s goofy, scary, haunting, sometimes bizarre. But not gory. So, why are the only two characters that get brutalized in painful detail (aside from the villain) gay? It’s 2025 - I really wish writers would think more about the impact of harming marginalized communities on screen.
Everyone on screen gave a decent performance. Julia Garner was a fantastic choice for Justine. She is weird and awkward and makes choices we don’t love. We question her and yet we don’t. Because of the way the story is told, the audience knows something the town doesn’t - that this is so much bigger than any one of them. And then, we are introduced to Gladys, played by Amy Madigan, and all other performances seem paltry in comparison.
The mystery of the missing children unfolds slowly and bizarrely as everything else, but if you know anything about witchcraft, it’s easy enough to spot from early on. I was totally down for the ride. Weapons is sharp, thoughtfully done with taut tension and emotive performances. It reminds me of some of M. Night Shyamalan’s early work – almost fairytale like – combined with that supernatural/demonic feeling of Insidious hovering just on the edges. 5/5.
Review By:
Chelsea Catherine
chelseacatherinewriter.com
